I'm a Foreign Service Officer and Pickering alumna. I'm not sure where life is taking me but stick around and we'll find out together.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

So...Namibia

As I mentioned, I spent a week camping in Namibia earlier this month and it was amazing. I followed up with a few days in Cape Town, but I'm sure this trip debrief will take longer than one post so lets just focus on first things first.

First take away from the trip: Group travel was invented by the devil to punish me.
I traveled with a tour group because I thought it'd be too hard to drive by myself in Namibia. Having seen the roads I can definitely say that I was afraid for no reason. There is no one on the roads, they are perfectly paved, there are lots of signs, everything is safe, and people drive like Americans. The group tour made a lot of aspects of the trip simple, but if I did the trip again I'd do it with a group of my own choosing.

Second take away: Namibia itself is fantastic.
We did a swing through the south of the country and while it required a lot of driving, the countryside was so beautiful that I was never bored.

We saw a ton of animals on several game drives and sometimes just driving from place to place; springbok, wildebeest, oryx, kudu, zebra, ostrich, seal, flamingo ... and plenty of cows, goats, and sheep of course.

We saw landscapes that mostly reminded me of the American Southwest - lots of mountains and mesas and plains and desert (both the Kalahari and the Namib). We also saw the highest dunes in the world and the second largest canyon in the world (Fish River Canyon). We camped in stifling heat and some very intense cold. We visited ghost towns filled with sand and fossil sites dotted with quiver trees.

I would highly recommend a trip to Namibia if you're in the region. I'd love to serve there in the future too. All that wide open space and the freedom to explore it would be so refreshing!